Cultural Amnesia (40 page)

It was hell; nor were they out of it; and the fuel that fed the flames was superstition of the most
unsophisticated kind. The superstition which held that bread and wine turned into the body and blood of Christ always had a poetic justification even when men were burning each other in
disagreement about whether it really happened, and on a practical level it scarcely matters whether it is true or not, because only the spiritual life is, or should be, affected. But the
superstition that Soviet agriculture would do better if it were collectivized by force was one that killed people by the millions, and none were more certain to be victims than those who looked
as if they might know the truth. There is a great danger, here, in ascribing the whole disaster to Stalin’s personal mania. Young people today who find it thrilling to flirt with the notion
that they might be Trotskyites should know that Trotsky’s voice was the very loudest in calling for a more thorough “militarization” of the struggle against the reactionaries on
the land: by which he meant that the peasants weren’t being massacred in sufficient numbers. It can be concluded, however, that agriculture was an area in which Stalin was particularly
loopy. Almost certainly it was the importance of biological research to agriculture that made Stalin see the attractions of putting the ineffable T. D. Lysenko in charge of biology.

Lysenko preached the kind of biological theories that Stalin could understand: i.e., they were poppycock. Stalin gave
Lysenko the power
of life and death over a whole field of science. The result was the collapse of Soviet biology and the permanent ruin of Soviet agriculture, which never
again produced enough grain to feed the nation. (The difference was made up by importing part of the American surplus at a knock-down price, a
sub rosa
agreement which continued throughout the Cold War.) But lest it be thought that Lysenko was the invention of Stalin and Stalin alone, it should be noted that it took the intervention of Andrei
Sakharov, then still at the height of his prestige as the golden boy of Soviet physics, to persuade Khrushchev against favouring Lysenko’s comeback. The dreadful truth was that the
superstitions had reached so deep into the fabric of the Soviet polity that nothing except a complete collapse could get them out. The notion that a government can plan a whole economy, for
example, was already known to be a superstition at the time of Marx. By the time of Lenin, there were no serious economic theorists in the world who thought that a command economy could exist
without a large area of private enterprise. Stalin spent his whole career in power proving that a state could plan every detail of an economy only at the cost of terrorizing a large part of the
population which might have hoped to benefit from it.

By the time of Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had effectively given up. The Twenty-fifth Party Congress in 1976 decreed that
the quality of consumer goods would be raised. I was there at the time and saw the decree hoisted into position on every second building, in red letters anything up to six feet high. The Soviet
Union certainly knew how to make signs. But nobody knew how to raise the quality of consumer goods. Brezhnev’s own consumer goods were all bought abroad, like his cars. Brezhnev bought his
shoes in Rome because no shoe factory in the Soviet Union could produce a pair of shoes that didn’t leak—a state of affairs which Stalin’s era had long ago proved as
especially
likely to come about if you threaten to shoot the official in charge. By Gorbachev’s time, the party hierarchs were no longer making a
secret of having their tailoring done abroad. (When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were
on file in Littrico’s office.) Even while it was still a qualification for membership of the Politburo that the old dreams should be paid earnest lip service as if they still had some life
in them, Andropov, head of the KGB, was
preparing his organization for the novel concept of
not
ruling by terror. Sakharov had tried and
failed to tell the Party that unless the Soviet Union embraced the concept of freedom of information there would be no way to continue. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz tried to tell
Gorbachev the same, with pie charts. But Andropov didn’t need telling. The intelligence community in the Soviet Union were the people who knew from experience that information and
superstition were different things. The story of how the Soviet Union backed out of its historical cul-de-sac is adequately told in Scott Shane’s
Dismantling
Utopia
, but it would be a blessing if John Le Carré could occupy himself with the biggest single mystery ever to come out of Moscow Central—how the men charged with State
Security managed to conspire against the state without becoming victims of each other merely for suggesting it. In his last years, I. F. Stone, an erstwhile sympathizer turned unyielding scourge,
developed an elaborate theory to prove that the Soviet apparatus of control could never voluntarily dismantle itself. Before the eminent sociologist Aleksandr Zinoviev was expelled from Russia,
he had already developed a similar theory, taking it so far as to suggest that even dissident writings like his own had come into existence only to support the structure by acting as a safety
valve. There would be no retreat. It couldn’t happen.

It couldn’t happen, but it happened. The story is hard to summarize and of course it isn’t over yet, any more
than history is over. Since the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons are even more dangerous now than when the state was making sure they were chipped free of rust, it is quite possible that the
end of history is in the offing, but not in the way that Francis Fukuyama was talking about. It was yet another superstition to believe that the collapse of one of history’s most complete
totalitarian dystopias would be succeeded automatically by a functioning democracy, as day follows night. In politics, it is more likely that a deep enough night will be followed by a lot more
night, and then by nothing at all. But to be too confident about that happening in this case would be yet another superstition, and would lead us away from the fascinating question of where men
like Andropov got their bad consciences from. They grew up in an atmosphere of unrelieved moral squalor. Through bad faith, they flourished; and good faith would have held them back. The system
had been designed so that they always
stood to benefit personally from the decay around them. If the whole thing had gone to the dogs, they would have been all right. Yet they
chose to dismantle the system that had given them their careers. Most men bend with the breeze: which is to say, they go with the prevailing power. But a few do not. With or without
Christ’s help, they grow a bad conscience. Thank God for that.

FRANÇOIS FURET

François Furet (1927–1997) was one of the most valuable liberal voices in France,
where they were in short supply. As a general rule, the liberalism of ex-Communists always needs to be searched with a careful eye for any signs of the original extremism’s having been
transferred to a new domicile, but Furet passes that test well. One of the first attempts to treat the effect of Communist ideology on a global basis, his book
Le Passé d’une illusion: Essai sur l’idée communiste au vingtième siècle
(1995) is a touchstone, and partly because he
himself had once been caught up in the illusion. Apart from his powers of realistic observation, one of the forces that shook him loose from his first allegiance was the conclusion he drew
from his studies of the French Revolution that its dogmatism was not just incidentally lethal, but necessarily so. New students can get the essence of his two-volume
La Révolution française
(1965, written with Denis Richet) in the sheaf of articles he wrote subsequently in defence of his view, published
posthumously as
La Révolution en débat
(1999). His views needed defending because almost everyone on the established left attacked them.
For
gauchiste
thinkers, Furet’s position on the Revolution required that he be discredited, but it was hard to do: he wrote too well.
The most accessible evidence of his journalistic brilliance is the lifetime collection of articles put together after his death by Mona Ozouf:
Un
Itinéraire intellectuel
(1999). Admirers of Jean-François Revel will find that Furet, as both thinker and writer, was in the same league, with something of the same
sardonic tone. But they will usually remember that Revel, before he championed liberation, had no illiberal position to repudiate. Furet had; and whether his personal history gave him the
advantage of experience is an abiding question, for him as for other lapsed believers.

In this clinically pure fascism, reduced to its own cultural
elements, the central point is racism, and the idea of race, impossible to think about clearly, is made up from an anti-image, that of the Jew. . . . Constituted at this level of
psychological depth, the fascist ideology is completely impermeable to historical experience.

—FRANÇOIS
FURET,
Un Itinéraire intellectuel
, P. 258

T
HE AUTHOR OF
the best
book in French about the history of Communism was part of the history. François Furet had been a Party member himself. Jean-François Revel has many times warned us about the
tendency of belatedly reformed
gauchiste
intellectuals to high-hat those who never fell for the drug in the first place. Furet, however, was too fine an
analyst to flaunt his superior experience. He could, had he wished, have flaunted his superior insight. In recent times France has been blessed by the presence of a gifted plain-language
philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, who writes almost full-time on the problem posed by the anti-Semitic heritage of modern France. But part of France’s recent run of good luck—it needed
some, in view of what the past was like—is that a philosopher like Finkielkraut has been accompanied, abetted and often preceded by older journalists, commentators and historians who were
forced to some of his conclusions by the weight of events. Furet never sat down to argue in a systematic way about nationalism and racism, but he had a knack for
turning in
the remark that opened the subject up. Talking about the noxious collaborator Lucien Rebatet, who managed to blame the Jews for their own deportation, Furet said that the right-wing ideologue has
nationalism in order to legitimize racism. It is always useful to be reminded that if an ideology contains a prejudice, the prejudice is likely to have been there first, like the splinter in the
fester, if not the speck of grit in the pearl.

Furet would have attracted far less opprobrium if he had stuck to criticizing the right. But his
criticism of the left was too uncomfortable to bear. His most irritating device, from the viewpoint of progressive orthodoxy, was to pick out the big lies of the past that were still resonating
in the present. Talking about the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s, Furet noted how Stalin made use of Hitler. Because Hitler was anti-Communist, Stalin was able to say that anybody else who
was anti-Communist must be a fascist. He could intimidate his liberal adversaries “
en répandant le soupçon que l’antisoviétisme
est l’antichambre du fascisme
” (by spreading the suspicion that anti-Sovietism was the antechamber to fascism) (
Le Passé d’une
illusion
, p. 266). Such a point from Furet put his
gauchiste
contemporaries on the spot, because they were still using the same tactic, calling
anyone who opposed left-wing orthodoxy an enemy of “democracy,” a word they employed only as a decoy. They inherited the usage from Stalin. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 proclaimed
the Soviet Union as the only true democracy. The proclamation was a musical prelude to the grinding of machinery, as the Great Terror was put into gear.